BibleProject | One Story That Leads to JesusSample

Paul has spent the first six chapters of his letter to the Romans hammering home a crucial point about the Torah: Law-following never could make a person right with God. The law is like a teacher (Gal. 3:24) that orients people to the life-giver but does not, in itself, provide life. In fact, God’s law has, over time, been most effective at exposing people’s weakness and sinful guilt.

So why give these commands to Israel in the first place? If knowing God’s law only makes a person guiltier, doesn’t that make the law a bad thing?

Not at all, Paul explains. The law is good, but it’s insufficient. It’s a first step in a much larger story. It can’t change people’s hearts or free them from death. And it cannot produce life.

Today’s reading shows Paul pivoting from a focus on what the law can’t do to what life in the Spirit can do. Only the Spirit restores humans to true life with God in Christ. Paul links this Spirit-empowered life to “righteousness” (from the Greek word dikaiosune)—a word that describes not “right law-following” but “right relating” between God, humanity, and all creation. You’ll learn more about that through the video.

The Spirit also shapes Christians into people who live and love like Jesus, through times of satisfaction and suffering alike. This shaping happens whether the suffering is from persecution or from the pains of self-discipline and sacrifice necessary to love others well. When Christians suffer on behalf of Jesus, they share in Jesus’ life-giving story. They trust God’s promise to protect life through death, into resurrection.

The news gets even better. When the Spirit raises human bodies from the dead, all creation—rainforests and rivers and dogs and dandelions—will also be renewed alongside them! God will free the Earth itself from the relentless gravity of decay and disorder. He will restore and make well all that he created.

As the Jesus-followers in Rome await this glorious future, they can take comfort in the midst of their suffering, knowing that, because of Christ, nothing can ultimately separate them from God’s love.

Reflection Questions

• Look back at Deuteronomy 30:1-10 and Ezekiel 36:26-27. According to today’s passage, how do Jesus and the Spirit fulfill God’s promise to give humanity a new heart that can follow God’s life-giving wisdom?
• Meditate on Isaiah 65:17-25. How might Isaiah’s prophecy help you understand the cosmic scope of God’s restoration? What imagery does Isaiah use to describe a creation that has been “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21)?